[You may use this image without prior permission
for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the
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First October 1849 illustration for Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. Steel etching. Source: Centenary
Edition (1911), volume one, facing page 294. All forty Phiz plates were
etched in duplicate, as was the case with Dombey and
Son, the duplicates differing only slightly from the originals.
Phiz contributed forty etchings and the "life of every man" wrapper
design. Image scan and text by Philip
V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any
scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who
scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

Commentary

"I return to the Doctor's after the party," the first
illustration for the sixth monthly number, containing chapters 16, 17, and 18,
illustrates the following textual passage from chapter 16, according to J. A.
Hammerton (1910):

The Doctor was sitting in his easy-chair by the fireside and his
young wife was on a stool at his feet.

As in the text, David tentatively enters, unseen for the moment by the
Strongs, as the elderly scholar reads aloud from a manuscript, and his young
wife looks up at him in rapt attention. Were the viewer unfamiliar with the
context, he or she might well conceive of the couple as father and daughter, as
David did when he first met them. And, indeed, this unsuitability of the
marriage of partners of such different ages is Dickens's salient point in these
chapters. Whereas, however, Dickens's Dr. Strong is a benign mentor for the
students in his charge, who admire him immensely, Phiz's aged scholar lacks the
"complacent smile" that reflects his delight in his lifetime's philological
labour, producing "that interminable Dictionary" (294).

The silent observer of the couple in Phiz's illustration is very much a
peripheral character here; the focus of the plate is the relationship between
the old doctor and his young wife, whose anxious expression in the illustration
realizes Dickens's description of her face as "so full of a wild, sleep-walking,
dreamy horror of I don't know what" (294). Although Phiz offers no suggestion as
to the boy's appraisal of this relationship, as opposed to the narrator's seeing
"Penitence,humiliation,shame, pride, love, and trustfulness" (295), the artist
provides background details that reflect the character of the study's chief
occupant. One receives an overall impression of disorder as pieces of paper
litter the floor, the waste-paper basket is full to overflowing, and large tomes
balance precariously upon one another behind the doctor's chair. Like the
doctor's thinning hair, everywhere in the room is disorder, with books occupying
chairs and unrecognizable specimens of natural history occupying the space above
the bookshelf. Underneath the map of Europe and Asia is the only readily
decipherable piece of writing in the room, "Brick [from] Babylon." Phiz is
presumably alluding to what must have seemed the impossible archaeological task
of unearthing and reconstructing the ancient cities of Nineveh and Babylon by
Sir Austen Henry Layard, whose second expedition to these Assyrian sites was
reported in the British press in 1849 through 1851, although Strong is hardly
the dashing adventurer that Layard must have seemed in late 1849 when he
published Nineveh and Its Remains after his discovery
of Sennacherib's Palace at Koujunjik in Mesopotamia.

As in "Changes at home", David is separated from the two
central figures of the composition by chairbacks, suggesting the gulf of
experience between the child-observer and the adult couple. Phiz intensifies the
reader's sense that David lacks sufficient maturity to offer a thorough
appraisal of this May/December marriage because he cannot understand the
sexuality of the beautiful young wife, to whose charms (emphasized by her bare
shoulders) her academically-obsessed, emotionally dessicated husband seems obvious. Thus the
chairbacks are a physical representation of David's lack of relevant experience
or lack of awareness, which Dickens fails to dramatize since his narrator
combines the observational powers of the child with the insights of the adult
who is narrating the story of his life. David in this illustration may be, as he
describes himself at school in Canterbury, "a new boy in more senses than one,"
but, in his now-familiar schoolboy's uniform and in his accustomed pose as an
observer of the adult world around him, he is David Copperfield, middle-class
child, once more, receiving lessons in relationships and in life.